The political economy of transnational action among international NGOs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The central premise of this volume is that a collective action approach based on a firm analogy can help both scholars and practitioners understand how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) interact with their organizational environment and make strategic choices. In doing so, the book seeks to challenge the dominant view (or perhaps complement it, as Risse [this volume] suggests) that NGOs are primarily driven by their common moral purpose and commitment to norms (Wapner, 1995; Finnemore, 1996; Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Boli and Thomas, 1999; Clark, 2001). While not denying that normative considerations play an important role in influencing NGO tactics and strategy, this volume seeks to reveal how structural forces and organizational pressures also guide the choices of international NGOs (INGOs), making their behavior akin to that of firms in the marketplace. In other words, instead of normative considerations dominating their decisions about advocacy strategy and tactics, the collective action approach suggests that instrumental concerns such as the desire to please multiple donors who control the budget strings play an important role in explaining INGO behavior. As a result, the normative gloss recedes in importance and INGOs can no longer be clearly distinguished from their instrumental counterparts that function in the economic marketplace This chapter examines transnational humanitarian action in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Bosnia. It highlights how organizational insecurity, competitive pressures, and fiscal uncertainty shape the choices of INGOs, and how these pressures can be traced to the institutional and structural context in which these groups function. This chapter demonstrates how powerful institutional imperatives can subvert INGO efforts, prolong inappropriate aid projects, or promote destructive competition among well-meaning transnational actors. Attempts by INGOs to reconcile material pressures with normative motivations often produce outcomes dramatically at odds with liberal expectations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".